Some TurboGears configuration thoughts

The TurboGears Python web framework uses Cherrypy as the web server. Cherrypy offers several other useful features other than strictly "web server" functionality. One of these features is project configuration. TurboGears basically builds on the Cherrypy configuration functionality. TurboGears also uses a Python package called ConfigObj to help distribute responsibilities. If there is one thing the TurboGears project does well, it would have to be reusing existing functionality rather than rebuild it.

When retrieving a configuration value in a TurboGears project using get(), TurboGears simply uses the Cherrypy configuration. However, the TurboGears framework is responsible for keeping the Cherrypy configuration component up to date. For example, lets say you need to update the project configuration dynamically as the result of some client request. This can be done is one of two ways. The first, you could pass a key/value dictionary to update(). The second, you could pass a configuration file to update_config(). In both cases, we are essentially updating the Cherrypy configuration. The ConfigObj package comes in handy when we need to read configuration files. Not when we already have a key/value configuration dictionary.

My main criticism of the TurboGears config module is that I wish there were a factory function that simply generated a configuration instance. This instance would be a representation of the configuration for the entire project. All the functions that are currently defined in the TurboGears config module could be instance methods of this new configuration class. I haven't yet looked in the trunk yet to see whats happening there with the config module.